evolgen: spots this common error in a Seed magazine article. Evolution – change in species over time – is a fact i.e. it can be observed, at the molecular level and elsewhere (for example drug resistance in bacteria). Natural selection as the mechanism for the origin of new species is the theory, supported by a mammoth weight of evidence.
A colleague and I were searching for a copy of Evolution by Gene Duplication by Susumu Ohno, in part to insert some knowledge on the subject into my thick head, and Sweet Fancy Moses! it’s expensive. More than 2 Gs for a copy in good condition. Given that it’s still the text on the subject I was shocked at how hard it is to come by. Not even any e-versions I could find on Google.
There are copies (currently out) in the SFU and UBC libraries. Any other options?
it really is. Via Primordial Blog, this poor kid’s brain is being malformed by his particular brand of home-schooling.
GrrlScientist has written an excellent overview of a much talked-about article in Nature, which accompanies this lovely schematic of the Mammalian supertree. 
The upshot of the article is that the common view that the mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago (the K/T boundary) cleared a path for the diversification of mammals is mistaken. They were already well on the way to establishing a broad diversity of orders. Says GrrlScientist:
However, contrary to this hypothesis, the new mammal "supertree"
shows that placental mammals had already diverged into several separate
orders by 93 million years ago — long before the bolide impact and at
a time when dinosaurs still ruled the planet. This supertree was
constructed from both fossil and genetic data (se supertree below). It
shows most of today’s mammalian lineages appeared between 100 and 85
million years ago. It also rebeals [sic] that the rate of mammalian evolution
barely changed after the dinosaurs had gone extinct. Despite this, it
was not until 10-35 million years after the K/T boundary when these
mammalian lineages began to thrive and further radiate into more modern
sub-groups… However, because most researchers now recognize that birds descended
from dinosaurs, at least one lineage of dinosaurs is still with us (the
birds) and there are more than 40 taxonomic orders of birds living
today…."There was a period of several million years at the end of this
period which witnessed several extinctions of non-avian dinosaurs,"
explained Jones. "So the old textbook idea that at the K/T boundary
dinosaurs disappeared and mammals appeared is a bit of a straw man."
Being the pedant I am, what is nagging me about this piece is the difference, in my mind, between the diversification of mammals, as documented above, and the "rise of mammals", the latter construct being more subjective. The long lag between the K/T extinction and the diversification of mammalian families seems to indicate that the extinction did not play a role in the rate of mammalian diversity. Is diversification synonymous with the "rise"? Sure, mammalian diversification occurred during the reign of the saurians, but it seems obvious to me that they would have remained the furtive, furry little critters hopping from hole to hole looking for a niche to squat. It’s hard to imagine the lion, tiger, mastodon, or any other charismatic fauna characterizing the rise of mammals (let alone humans) in the absence of the K/T extinctions.
This is fun, I stumbled across it at Blog Around the Clock.
Now that I take the bus or the bicycle, I rarely catch The Current. Today, however, I drove to SFU for a meeting and was treated to two pieces worth listening to. The first was on Indonesia and its spate of recent disasters, natural and otherwise:
In the two-plus years since an estimated 160,000 Indonesians were
killed in the 2004 tsunami, thousands more have died in earthquakes,
hundreds have perished in landslides and floods and hundreds more in
plane crashes and ferry accidents. There have been three aircraft
accidents involving Boeing 737s since New Year’s Day. Infact, more
people died in disasters in Indonesia than in any other country last
year. And as if to add insult to injury, the environment ministry says
2,000 of the archipelago’s 17,000 islands could disappearing under
rising sea levels caused by climate change over the next 25 years.
The most interesting speaker was Debby Guha-Sapir, the director of the Centre for Research on the
Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Leuven in Brussels,
Belgium. She correctly laid a fair amount of blame at the feet of corrupt government officials’ failures to avoid and / or mitigate many of these catastrophes.
The second segment dealt with the battle over creationism in science classrooms in Turkey, and touched on how Muslim and Christian fundamentalists are finding common cause in their desire to push back the Enlightenment.
Now THAT was high quality radio.
The audio can be reached by clicking through the link above.
I found this helpful column in the Edmonton Sun. I say helpful because it provides a useful primer on basic misunderstandings of science, particularly biology, extant in the popular press.
Choice bits:
..Because, I would assume, to believe that millions of types of fish, butterflies, rodents, polar bears and a myriad of other species will be completely and utterly wiped off the face of the Earth by global warming is to also believe that these animals are creatures entirely without the ability to adapt or evolve.
Now I could argue all the reasons why I believe that evolutionary theories are flawed, just as I can argue all of the reasons why I believe that climate change theories are flawed, too.
But I’m not going to.
Instead, I’m going to simply ask out loud why all of these threatened species
won’t be able to adapt and evolve and survive climate change….
….Meanwhile, I’ll just continue to troll the Internet looking for all the papers and studies I can find on the evidence of evolution – how bacteria can supposedly induce the necessary mutations needed to survive a hostile environment, how certain birds apparently have thicker bills during dry years when tough nuts are the only food available, and so on.
If the answer to the dilemma is that this big shift in our climate is largely manmade and moving too quickly for animals to adapt, I will just point out that every time I have expressed my skepticism about evolution on the grounds that the supposedly evolved changes in some species are irreducibly complex, and, therefore, difficult to chalk up to just random chance, it is pointed out to me that the fossil record shows few, if any, transition species, suggesting that animals can evolve with alarming speed when need be.
Often you read or hear versions of this. If a polar bear can’t pop out a few gills by 3 PM tomorrow rather than drown, then of course evolutionary theory is all wrong. Evolution (i.e. changes in species over time) is a fact, not a theory. If you believe in drug resistance or understand modern agriculture (this is what corn looked like thousands of years ago), you believe in evolution. The mechanism, natural selection as described by Darwin and Wallace, is the theoretical bit.
Firstly, the average person, including the author of above, has a tough time conceptualizing deep time – the scale of measure for evolutionary change. The "alarming speed" as referenced above is measured in tens of thousands, or millions of years for complex species. Orders of magnitude greater than the timescale over which climate change effects will take hold. Yes, many many species will adapt and change, as our prehuman ancestors did to a cold climate. Others, like the dinosaur, will disappear.
Secondly, the author fails to understand that natural selection is not about, as I mentioned before, an individual species getting a tweak and suddenly fitting in to a drastic change in environment. Natural selection is about differential survival, it’s a process of ‘culling’. Extreme events, like those that ended the age of the dinosaurs, are like a lawnmover passing across a field of flowers, missing a few remaining stems that will survive to propagate. The theory is consistent with the mass extinction worries described at the top of the quote. There is no scientific contradiction here.
Biologists are raising these alarms because they, like most Canadians, would like to avoid the mass deaths of many of our most magnificent animals and plants and, indeed, becoming part of the cull ourselves.
On February 12, 1809, 2 remarkable men were born – Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. 
Go celebrate. Revolutionize science or 
free a nation or something.
The birthday of natural selection’s co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, was yesterday, noted by Stranger Fruit. Coincidentally I am reading a book by Tim Severin, A Spice Islands Voyage, about his travels in Wallace’s footsteps in eastern Indonesia.
iBiome 
